Cuno Pümpin

Cuno Pümpin (born August 21, 1939 in Basel ) is a Swiss economist . Since 1994 he has been adjunct professor at the University of St. Gallen .

Pümpin is the recipient of the Swiss Innovation Prize. In the early 1980s, he developed the concept of strategic success positions (SEP), which today is widely known as core competency . Pümpin primarily publishes on the subject of strategic management . He himself worked in business for eleven years and has a seat on the board of directors ( supervisory board ) in several companies - mainly in the financial sector .

origin

Cuno Pümpin was born as the second son of Fritz Pümpin (1901–1972) and Rosa Gerster in Basel and is a citizen of Gelterkinden .

Career

Pümpin attended primary and district school in the canton of Basel-Landschaft . He then completed a commercial apprenticeship. After graduating from high school in 1961, he studied economics for two years in Basel, then moved to the University of St. Gallen, where he graduated in 1966. oec. acquired. In 1968 he received his doctorate from the University of St. Gallen with a dissertation on "Long-term marketing planning".

activities

Professional activities

From 1965 to 1967, Pümpin worked in the corporate development department of JR Geigy AG (now part of Novartis ) in Basel. In 1967 he switched to the computer company Sperry Univac (now part of Unisys ), where he soon became head of the training and information department. In 1970 he was appointed to the management of Sperry Univac Switzerland with responsibility for marketing.

Parallel to his work in business practice, Pümpin wrote his habilitation thesis on "Information and Marketing" in 1970 and 1971 . In 1972 he was appointed private lecturer and in 1973 he was elected part-time professor of business administration at the University of St. Gallen. In 1973 Pümpin took over the management of the Management Center St. Gallen (MZSG), a training and consulting organization associated with the HSG at the time.

In 1977 Pümpin founded his own company, which focused in particular on consulting in the field of strategic management. During this time, most of the international corporations in Switzerland were among his customers. In addition to his teaching and consultancy activities, he has served on various boards of directors, including ATAG Ernst & Young AG , Ems Chemie Holding AG, Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT) AG , Metro International AG and as an international advisory board for Private Equity Blackstone company . In the Fürst von Liechtenstein Foundation - where he was a member of the Board of Trustees - and in LGT, he played a key role in the international development of this group. He was also active as an advisory board and commission member in various university institutes. Today he is President of the Institute for Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen.

From the mid-1970s, Pümpin was a regular speaker at international congresses and conferences, such as the World Economic Forum , the ISC St. Gallen and the Management Center Europe. Lecture tours have taken him to many overseas countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc.

In 1985, Pümpin and a small group of investors acquired Scheidegger, a training company that operates throughout Europe and has over 1,000 employees, which he chaired in the following years. The company was later sold again after a restructuring.

In the 1990s, as a member of the board of directors of Metro International AG, Pümpin played a key role in establishing the Metro corporate venture company Invision. After a management buyout , he was first Vice President and since 2002 President of the Board of Directors of Invision Holding AG, a leading private equity firm in Switzerland today.

Also in the 1990s, Pümpin worked as an advisor to governments . In cooperation with the government and important parties and associations of Andorra, he developed the country strategy of this Pyrenees state. In 1990 he was appointed by the Federal Council of the Swiss Confederation to the “Federal Government Leadership Structures Working Group”, where he advised the Federal Council on the design of the federal leadership structures.

Scientific activity

In his career, Pümpin published thirteen books and over 100 specialist articles. His books have been translated into more than ten languages.

One of his most successful publications was "Strategic Leadership in Corporate Practice" (1980), which was printed in over 200,000 copies.

The book “Management of strategic success positions - The SEP concept as the basis of effective corporate management” (1982) can be described as the most important work. In this book, he defined a strategic position for success (SEP) as “... a prerequisite consciously created in a company through the development of important and dominant skills, which allows this company to achieve superiority over the competition and thus above-average results in the long term.” (Management of strategic success positions , P. 34). The concept of strategic success positions largely corresponds to the core competence approach propagated by Hamel and Prahalad in 1990 (see Harvard Business Review, May - June 1990) or that of Stalk and others at the end of the 80s. a. published concept of "Core Capabilities" (see Harvard Business Review, March - April 1992). Pümpin is thus the pioneer of the concept of core competencies, which is now used worldwide. In the 219-page book “Management of Strategic Success Positions”, Pümpin shows the entrepreneurial fields of activity in which SEP / core competencies can be built up. He then develops ten strategic principles that must be observed when determining SEP / core competencies. Finally, he deals in detail with the question of how SEP / core competencies can be built up. Here he anticipated the much-discussed topic of strategy implementation in the 1980s and 90s.

The concept of strategic success positions found international recognition. This was licensed by Ernst & Young in the 1980s as the basis for in-house strategy consulting. In 1983 he was awarded the Swiss Innovation Prize for developing this concept.

The book “The Dynamic Principle” published in 1990, which was voted the best specialist book of the year by Euromarketing, also received a lot of attention. In this plant, Pümpin has further developed its strategic approach. As one of the first authors, he emphasized the importance of the multiplication / scalability of business activities. In this way, he showed which requirements must be met in the company for successful multiplication. He also dealt in depth with the question of how sustainable scaling can be achieved.

Publications

• Long-term marketing planning, conception and formalization (Diss. 1968, 2nd ed. 1970, 136 pp.).
• Information and marketing, information systems as a management basis (Habil., 1973, 234 p.).
• Strategic leadership in business practice (1980, 80 p., French 1981, English 1982).
• Management of strategic success positions (1982, 217 pp., Spanish 1982 - with S. Garcia Echevarria, title: Estrategia Empresarial - como implementar la estrategia en la empresa , English 1987: Title: The essence of Corporate Strategy , Portuguese 1987, Japanese 1987, Finnish 1989, Korean 1989, Indian edition Bombay 1995).
• Corporate culture - basis of strategic profiling of successful companies (1985, 56 p. With J.-M. Kobi and HA Wüthrich, French 1985). Cultura Empresarial (1988, 139 p. With S. Garcia Echevarria).
• The dynamic principle (1989, paperback 1991, English 1989, Spanish 1990 - with S. Garcia Echevarria, French 1991, Italian 1993, Indian edition Bombay 1995, new edition How World Class Companies Became World Class , 1991.)
• Company dynamics - How do we lead companies into new dimensions? (64 p. 1991, with C. Imboden, French 1991).
• Management of corporate development - phase-appropriate management and dealing with crises (1991, 276 p., With J. Prange).
• Strategic success positions - methodology of dynamic strategic corporate management (1992, 202 pp.).
• Strategic success positions - building up and implementing core competencies , with Wolfgang Ammann (2005, 136 pp.)
• The private equity investor as strategy coach , with Bernd Pfister, Martin Ankli, Wolfgang Ammann (2005, 167 pp.)
• Corporate Development - Corporate Life Cycles: Metamorphosis Instead of Collapse , with Christian Wunderlin (2005, 215 pp.)
• The Empowered Investor - 7 Principles for Strategic Wealth Creation in a New Financial World , with Heinrich Liechtenstein, Fariba Hashemi, Brian Hashemi (2014, 155 pp.)
• From manager to investor , with Marius Fuchs (2017, 216 pp.)
• Transformation through value jump management , with Marius Fuchs (2019, 223 pp.)

Web links

• Official website of Cuno Pümpin
• Literature by and about Cuno Pümpin in the catalog of the German National Library